Cessation of Breath: A Mechanical Meditation on the Moment Before Death
by Natalie Bowers
[editor's note: As our readers understand from the following narrative, Steven Finke wishes the experience of his work to be entirely private. Our reviewer, Natalie Bowers, was one of the rare people invited to go there. Read her narrative of the experience.]
I visited Steven Finke on his 38 Acres in Felicity, Ohio, where he has built his sculptural installation Cessation of Breath: A Mechanical Meditation on the Moment Before Death. He has been working on this piece for 13 years and, although still unfinished, he considers it his life work. He only allows a few to experience it, and the experience is not easily grasped or comprehended. The installation's meaning is largely what is revealed within each viewer. While Finke has labored to produce some impeccable sculptural works, his goal is to set the stage for viewers to experience their own meditation, and ultimately transformation.
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Kristin Spangenberg
by Jane Durrell
Kristin Spangenberg, 2010. Photo by Eric R. Greiner.
"A young Californian has come out of the west. . .to take over the curator's post in the Print Department of the Cincinnati Art Museum" reported the art columnist for the Cincinnati Post, September 24, 1971. The new curator was Kristin Spangenberg, this month marking her thirty-ninth year at the Museum, and I was the art columnist.
Both of us were new at our jobs—it was my first month at the paper, and Spangenberg had only just arrived—but she brought more experience to her position than I brought to mine. In addition to a master's degree in art history she had held intern/curatorial assistant posts at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan's print and photograph department in New York. My philosophy was "learn on the job" but Kristin had learned on more jobs than I had.
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Evoking the Personal: Kristine Donnelly's Paperwork at the Taft Museum
by Maria Seda-Reeder
Pose, 2010. Photo by Eric R. Greiner.
How might a contemporary artist respond to an art space that is rich in historical allusions such as the Taft Museum? Only the second "Emerging Artist" invited to exhibit her work, Kristine Donnelly found that an appealing question when she visited the museum's inaugural Keystone Contemporary Series show last year for Emil Robinson's exhibition, Axis Mundi. Compared to Robinson's Contemporary Realist studio paintings however, Donnelly's post-studio sculptures are more inconspicuous in their connection to the Taft's priceless collection of old-world European masters—particularly given her choice of medium. Using the building blocks of interior design, Donnelly's installation engages and underscores the museum's Victorian architectural aesthetic—unexpectedly suggesting something intimately personal in the way the artist plays with basic elements of pattern, material, scale, and even title.
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Traditional Approaches to Radical Art
by Maria Seda-Reeder
Harris, Mark.
Balance and Equilibrium, 2010.
Mark Harris is an artist, critic, curator, and the current Director of the School of Art at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning. His diverse range of works include mixed media, sound installation, cut paper, artist books, and paintings. For his recent exhibition at Country Club Gallery, Harris created five graphite-on-paper drawings and five large-scale oil-on-linen paintings, sourced directly from Dick Fairfield's study, "The Modern Utopian: Communes, U.S.A.," (1970).
The two disciplines that Harris studied during his academic career were painting and philosophy; his current exhibition reveals an intellectual exchange between the two. Given his formalist knowledge of painting technique and in light of his philosophical interests, Harris demonstrates Hegelian and Marxist dialectics in this recent exhibition. A Romantic in the tradition of Baudelaire and Lord Byron, he depicts, with conceptual nostalgia, subjects who tried to reject materialism through a communal lifestyle. Paradoxically, Harris employs didactic text as historical allusion to ephemera, downplaying the art object in a critique of capitalism.
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